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PubMed

PubMed is a free interface for searching MEDLINE, the most popular bibliographic database in the health and medical sciences. It contains references to millions of journal articles from biomedical journals and is updated daily.

What's a DOI?

A Digital Object Identifier (or DOI) is a permanent, stable link to a specific item online. It is more stable than a URL, as URLs can change, for example if an organization re-structures its website. You might see the DOI in a reference list or bibliography, as it is a reliable way to locate articles online.

What's a PubMed ID (PMID)?

Each PubMed record has a PMID number. A PubMed unique identifier (PMID) is a unique identifying number assigned to every PubMed record as it is added to the database. You can search for an article by its PMID by simply entering the unique identifying number into the simple search box. 

Cite button

Each PubMed result has a Cite button, which lets you grab a properly-formatted citation in a citation style of your choice.

If you use reference management software then you can also export batches of results. 

display optionsViewing results

You can edit the Display options to alter your view of your search results.

By default results are shown in Summary view. Change the format of the results from Summary view to Abstract view to see the full abstract as well as full-text links and supplementary information such as MeSH terms. If you would like to see only a selection of results in Abstract view then you can check the boxes by records of interest before you change your display options. 

sort bySorting references

You can choose how to sort your references under Sort by in the Display options menu.

Results are automatically sorted to Best Match. This uses an algorithm which counts the number of times that your search terms appear in a record. Other criteria applied in order to rank the order of results in Best Match include publication type and year.

This feature is intended to help you find highly relevant papers quickly and is useful for quick scoping searches.

If you are doing a structured search, for example using the MeSH feature and Advanced Search to combine terms, we would recommend you sort by either publication date or most recent. This is because the Best Match algorithm is constantly changing and it is not possible to replicate a set of search results generated by using this feature. If you have used search operators such as AND and OR then these are also not fully applied, and  you can not know exactly how your search has been carried out.